20 Five-and-Dime Tricks That Invented Impulse Buying

Walk up to virtually any checkout lane today and you’ll see candy, mints and nail files piled up around the register. It’s a holdover from the days of the five-and-dime. From the 1910s through the 1950s, variety chains lined the area surrounding the register with cheap trinkets for customers to add to their piles. While they waited for the clerk to wrap their purchases and return their change, they glanced over at the nearby rack and often slipped one more item into the pile. Today’s checkout lanes still use the same technique.

In June 1879, American retailer Frank Woolworth opened a shop in Lancaster, Pennsylvania, where customers could walk up to a selection of wares displayed on open, wooden tables. In the past, they had to ask a clerk to retrieve each item from a locked cabinet. Woolworth wasn’t the originator of open-table shopping, but as his business grew, he brought the concept to towns across the United States, allowing consumers to browse at will and buy items they hadn’t meant to buy.

Between 1879 and 1880, Frank Woolworth put 5-cent signs over his tables in Utica, New York, and later added 10-cent signs at his store in Lancaster, Pennsylvania. Prior to that time, the average consumer negotiated with a salesperson, and prices were often based on whether the customer appeared wealthy enough to warrant a good deal. Chain stores such as John Wanamaker’s had experimented with set prices, but only for more expensive wares. The innovation that Woolworth introduced was taking this approach downmarket and making it available nationwide. Customers no longer needed to negotiate. They just had to look.

In the early 1900s, Woolworth, S. S. Kresge and G. C. Murphy placed open glass trays of penny candy, chocolate and freshly roasted nuts under warming lamps right by their front doors. This would trigger cravings among pedestrians on the street, compelling them to enter a store and perhaps make a purchase, even if that wasn’t why they’d gone out.

Long before radios were ubiquitous in every American home, five-and-dime stores had on-staff pianists known as song pluggers. They played the latest pop songs in person at the sheet-music counter between 1900 and 1930. People would gather around to listen and buy the sheets on the spot. Woolworth alone reportedly sold more than 20 million a year at its height. And this wasn’t just one chain. Even George Gershwin, the future Broadway composer, did it for a music publisher, as a way to sell songs.

In the 1890s through the 1930s, the stores of such chain retailers as S. H. Kress & Co., founded by Samuel H. Kress, and Woolworth, were often outfitted with mirrored glass panels that clad their interior walls and structural columns. Electric light and merchandise reflected in those mirrors made an interior case stocked with items such as jewelry, glassware, or cosmetics look twice as deep and far better supplied than it really was.

Between 1900 and 1910, variety stores began adding simple soda fountains. In 1923, F. W. Woolworth Co. introduced the first full luncheonette counter to serve hot food at its store in New Albany, Indiana. Customers who came in to get a soda or lunch had to walk out past displays of open merchandise, frequently purchasing something they hadn’t intended to. What had been a brief lunch stop had become an opportunity for additional sales.

Beginning in the 1890s, five-and-dime chains filled their stores with overflowing tables of inexpensive wares, from glass tumblers to tin toys, stacked rather than displayed. The huge stacks advertised value and invited shoppers to search through the mounds for something they liked. Sam Walton, who would go on to found the Walmart chain, replicated the strategy in his early Ben Franklin franchise stores. It appears that being cheap and engaging in a treasure hunt are one and the same.

In the late 1880s, Charles Sumner “Sum” Woolworth, Frank Woolworth’s brother and co-founder of the family chain, was running the company’s store in Scranton, Pennsylvania, when he came up with a better way to present merchandise: He slid thin strips of glass into adjustable wooden channels on the store’s countertops, creating neat, glass-tray compartments for items like ribbons, buttons, and cosmetics. The cluttered table suddenly became an attractive display of goods. And this wasn’t Frank’s idea. It was Sum’s.

By the end of the 1890s, Woolworth Co. and rivals like S. S. Kresge and J. G. McCrory had completed their storefronts in brilliant red enamel with gold-leaf lettering and large plate-glass windows extending all the way to the sidewalk. Professional window dressers stacked hundreds of cheap wares into pyramid-like formations in the display windows, instantly making the brand recognizable to passersby along bustling thoroughfares. Not every storefront looked the same, though. Kresge also ran more expensive “green front” shops.

From the 1910s through the 1950s, variety stores had professional demonstrators at certain counter islands for showing off vegetable slicers, glass cutters, embroidery hoops, or fudge being made on the spot. Seeing how a product worked in the hands of another person, surrounded by other people, was very different from simply reading about the product. Many observers purchased the product while still standing at the counter.

In the 1920s, store designers developed the endcap, a display table used for promotions set in front of an aisle where it intersects a main aisle through the store. It’s where you put seasonal items or kitchen gadgets that disrupt the shopper’s flow and draw their attention to things they wouldn’t normally look at. The endcap is basically what anchors nearly every modern grocery aisle.

In the 1920s, visual merchandisers at chain stores such as Kresge, Woolworth and W. T. Grant drafted floor manuals in which they prescribed the precise location of each item on the shelves. Eye-catching novelties, high-margin cosmetics and seasonal products went on the middle shelves, about four feet from the floor, at the average person’s eye level. Lower-priced bulk products sat at the bottom of the display, forcing shoppers to bend or crouch to find them.

By the 1930s and 1940s, the cellophane produced by chemical giant Du Pont was being used to wrap small assortments of hard candy, buttons, and stationery sold at five-and-dime stores. Clear, wrappable cellophane allowed the customer to view a product’s precise color and quality before purchase without the need to open the packaging and potentially damage the item. Storefront counters remained tidy while shoppers could still lift packages from displays to choose merchandise based on visual inspection alone.

In September 1878, Frank Woolworth was working as a clerk in the dry goods store of Moore & Smith in Watertown, New York. He placed a table covered with a red cloth in one of the windows of the store and piled it high with 5-cent goods to dispose of some unsalable stock. It worked. The low prices and the noisy display attracted customers who, incidentally, purchased more costly articles. This occurred nine months before Woolworth established his store in Lancaster.

In the 1920s, five-and-dime floor manuals instructed store managers to place similar items close to each other, such as shoe polish adjacent to shoelaces, and needles and thread near buttons. Customers’ exposure to one product would trigger memories of another, thus prompting them to make a second unplanned purchase. One errand, completed while passing the proper aisle, had become two.

Between the 1920s and 1950s, five-and-dime chains devoted aisles to holidays: Christmas ornaments, Valentine’s Day cards, or Halloween novelties, changing out items seasonally to keep the aisle fresh. It was part of the standardization of store layout that encouraged repeat customers to visit the store for new wares and not just a one-time run for particular items.

By the 1910s, in fact, corporate designers for F. W. Woolworth and two other major variety chains, W. T. Grant and S. S. Kresge, a competitor, had standardized the floor plans for all their stores. There were wide central walkways, called gangways, that passed open islands of counters, accessible from every direction. Thus, a shopper who walked the gangway would pass countless display tables. But this uniformity was not incidental. It was designed exposure.

For decades after its founding, the five-and-dime was bound by strict 5- and 10-cent price limits. The effect of the price caps was to make all purchases seem trivial and costless. Afterward, prices increased, and S. S. Kresge, a competitor chain, opened higher-priced “green front” stores as well as traditional nickel-and-dime “red front” ones. F. W. Woolworth Co. eventually increased its price ceiling to 20 cents in 1932, and completely eliminated price ceilings in 1935, allowing stores to sell virtually anything at virtually any price.

In 1952, Harry B. Cunningham, a vice president of the S. S. Kresge Company, opened a test store in Detroit, Michigan. He replaced the counter islands staffed by clerks with a modern supermarket-style store that featured entry turnstiles, wire hand baskets, and cash registers located solely at the point of exit. Customers entered, walked throughout the entire store, selected their own goods for their baskets, and only spoke to a clerk when they reached the cash register. Cunningham applied this same store layout when he founded Kmart a decade later.

This content was created with the help of AI.